Enjoying the game on Explorer mode!

[Emerance]

This post is simple a place for other people to throw in what they have enjoyed about the game. I am playing on Explorer difficulty. I just don't have the time or desire to "prove" how gigachad I am by beating the game on the other difficulties.

I am enjoying the game and story. I have actually had my party wipe and my characters go to zero HP a couple of times due to overwhelming fights. I think explorer mode is how most DnD 5e campaigns actually go. (I ran one for 2+ years where my players hit level 13.)

Truly, it is tough as hell to die in DnD 5e past level 1 or 2. The DM (me) has to really make an effort to target your downed PC while they are making death saves to kill them.

Explorer mode feels like it isn't just making the game easier, but the story more enjoyable, and way less frustrating to play the game. I don't care if others see this as "not playing the game it was meant to be played". It is similar to how people pop a vein in their forehead thinking about others using summons in Elden Ring.

Enjoy the game how you want to enjoy it! I am using Shadowheart, Will, and Karlach. And I am enjoying all of them: personality, voice acting, and appearance. Also, it is nice that Shadowheart's romance isn't like an instant sex scene, it takes time and you need to build her trust.

[yhibiki]

I actually wish explorer mode were easier. As it is, I'm still wasting so much time reading tooltips and menus and waiting for battles to be over already. I've resorted to cheating my stats as high as they can go because failing dice rolls and whiffing in battles is annoying and unfun, and doesn't serve any purpose except to prolong things.

I don't want clutch saves. I don't long encounters. I just want to enjoy the story. I love the characters and the story is fun, but having to watch the damn dice rolls for every single step on an environmental hazard (and have my character half dead by the time we reach whatever boss is on the other end) is just obnoxious. (and of course, it's not just ONE character. No, they all have to roll their dice, over and over.)

inb4 people tell me not to play the game. I'm starved for party-based RPGs right now but I can't imagine I'll come back to this game over and over the way I have with Dragon Age, not without mods to trivialize the encounters further.

[Ka-mai19]

Yeah I made the switch as well. I really wanted to keep playing on balanced but I ended up needing to save scum 10-20 times per major encounter to get through it. That got annoying after a while.

I do wish that they had more options to fine-tune difficulty rather than three set difficulties. Like maybe toggles for more Ally HP and less Enemy HP (or the opposite if you want more challenge). Or higher chances to succeed on specific kinds of rolling (saving, attacking, proficiency), etc. Make things customizeable so that the player can more easily control the level of challenge they want.

[Veg]

You made an entire post to justify to yourself that its okay to play on journalist mode. You do you man but its kinda weird that you feel the need to do this

[Licenturion]

There are threads on Reddit that say that explorer mode is bugged at the moment because the player gets +2 on rolls, but also the enemies resulting in fight were enemies in explorer mode have more HP than in balanced mode.

When they fix this, explorer mode will probably feel more like story mode.

[Emerance]

Originally posted by Veg:

You made an entire post to justify to yourself that its okay to play on journalist mode. You do you man but its kinda weird that you feel the need to do this

Wasn't justifying it to myself, more so to remind other people it is ok to enjoy the game without feeling the need to play it on a higher difficulty to prove something.

[Emerance]

Originally posted by yhibiki:

I actually wish explorer mode were easier. As it is, I'm still wasting so much time reading tooltips and menus and waiting for battles to be over already. I've resorted to cheating my stats as high as they can go because failing dice rolls and whiffing in battles is annoying and unfun, and doesn't serve any purpose except to prolong things.

I don't want clutch saves. I don't long encounters. I just want to enjoy the story. I love the characters and the story is fun, but having to watch the damn dice rolls for every single step on an environmental hazard (and have my character half dead by the time we reach whatever boss is on the other end) is just obnoxious. (and of course, it's not just ONE character. No, they all have to roll their dice, over and over.)

inb4 people tell me not to play the game. I'm starved for party-based RPGs right now but I can't imagine I'll come back to this game over and over the way I have with Dragon Age, not without mods to trivialize the encounters further.

I agree for sure. I wish they had added in morale rules like a lot of OSR games do. Where when half of an enemies' forces remain, they make a save to see if they run, surrender, or flee.

It is also annoying how the Nere scene seems to lead to a fight no matter what you do. I reloaded it about 5 times and tried various options before realizing that no matter what, I have to fight like 15 enemies.

It is definitely annoying when your character has a +15 to a roll and needs a DC10, but you still need to roll just in case they roll a natural 1. An option to remove the dice rolling animation would be nice and being able to just "take 10" as they used to call it in DnD 3.5. Or simply by-pass a roll when your modifiers surpass it.

[dustin1280]

good for you? Play the game how you want...

[Emerance]

Originally posted by caev91:

Yeah I made the switch as well. I really wanted to keep playing on balanced but I ended up needing to save scum 10-20 times per major encounter to get through it. That got annoying after a while.

I do wish that they had more options to fine-tune difficulty rather than three set difficulties. Like maybe toggles for more Ally HP and less Enemy HP (or the opposite if you want more challenge). Or higher chances to succeed on specific kinds of rolling (saving, attacking, proficiency), etc. Make things customizeable so that the player can more easily control the level of challenge they want.

I agree fully, it is annoying and wierd that there isn't any real explanation in the menu of what is actually different about the modes. I had to read other discussions here on Steam and google information to find what is different.

I wish they had more fine-tuning like Pathfinder: Kingmaker did. Just less enemy HP and not giving them a random +2 or +4 to things is really all that is needed.

[Emerance]

Originally posted by Licenturion:

There are threads on Reddit that say that explorer mode is bugged at the moment because the player gets +2 on rolls, but also the enemies resulting in fight were enemies in explorer mode have more HP than in balanced mode.

When they fix this, explorer mode will probably feel more like story mode.

Ah, that is suuupppeerr cool. Yeah, I would rather play this more like a story mode. I spent enough time as a DM and player with DnD 5e to know that combat is sort of the worst and longest part of the game.

It becomes very boring fast at the table for me. I was hoping to avoid that same feeling by playing the game on the easier difficulty. Especially since 99% of harder difficulties to games is just more enemy health, not really interesting changes. I did read that Larian went through and modified each combat encounter by hand for tactician mode. So I might try it later on to see just how different it feels.

[jesusofchicago]

Larian's 'Explorer Mode's are still a challenge, but you have a little more room for mistakes. There's so much to enjoy in the game, I'd say if combat was frustrating to anyone, definitely give Explorer a try.

The roughest part of any CRPG is having a DM that doesn't know when to back off. Part of being a great DM is knowing how to balance the challenge, and not make the game feel like punishment, which it can. Players CAN die, but maybe have a known resurrection spot that doesn't drain them of all resources.

Sounds like you DM fairly, and set the game to do the same with you. Anyone who disagrees with that probably hasn't ever had to run a game. Cheers!

[Jimi]

Only weirdos care how others play their single player games. You don't need to defend yourself or explain why you play the way you do. That being said, I feel the same way as yhibiki : I don't want clutch saves. I don't want long encounters. I just want to enjoy the story. The reaction to this is of course ; "you shouldn't have bought the game then".
And that is 100% true. Maybe Larian will throw the likes of us a bone anyway.

[Mobiusx2]

I changed to explorer mode because I couldn't stand all of the missing. Just feels outdated to me. Missing in RPGs feels more like a 90s thing to add artificial difficulty. On Explorer it feels a lot more random so it's not rage inducing when you do miss.
Not to mention the battles with NPCs would be incredibly frustrating in hard difficulties because the NPCs do lots of stupid crap to get themselves killed.

[Honkiewithaboomstick]

Originally posted by caev79:

Yeah I made the switch as well. I really wanted to keep playing on balanced but I ended up needing to save scum 10-20 times per major encounter to get through it. That got annoying after a while.

I do wish that they had more options to fine-tune difficulty rather than three set difficulties. Like maybe toggles for more Ally HP and less Enemy HP (or the opposite if you want more challenge). Or higher chances to succeed on specific kinds of rolling (saving, attacking, proficiency), etc. Make things customizeable so that the player can more easily control the level of challenge they want.

This
me and my girlfriend were playing on normal but got tired of all of the misses on our rolls and switched to easy in act 2 shortly after the god awful Halsin encounter.

Would love the ability to just increase health, damage and roll modifiers on sliders in a "custom" difficulty option.

I like the increased player healthpools and rolling bonuses of easy but would like to retain the enemy damage and enemy health pools of tactician or normal. something ideally less anoying to deal with than balanced but not as brain dead as story mode

[Pan Darius Cassandra]

I have played on every difficulty setting, including trying solo Tactician, and all I can say about it is that Exploration mode is the most fun and Tactician mode the most tedious.

The AI isn't any smarter in Tactician, instead enemies are just given stat bloat so combat takes longer and you have to use more cheating/exploits/cheese, but in the end you can still just outlevel any encounter if you need to.

To me, the best balance of fun is playing in Explorer mode with voluntary handicaps, like solo or with fewer party members (a party of two can be a lot of fun in Explorer mode) and using fewer exploits.

Larian should have given us a granular setting menu like Pathfinder does so we could choose our own level of stat bloat.

[Subset6]

You can pretty much do this with the item mod that gives you like a ton of items, the variety is huge and you can really tailor it to what you want. For example some items have huge attribute boots, others may have spells like teleport. I have yet to try this on release but did on EA and it was really fun.